Marketing Advice

Your homepage gets the most visits. Obvious right? But do you know the page most people visit second to your home page? That’s right; it is your “About page.” It doesn’t matter if you have an industrial website or financial services, or construction.

Your "About" page is important.

So why are people always screwing up their “About page”? I think the name throws people off. People hear “about page” and believe it is supposed to be about your company. It is not.

What is Inbound Marketing? And why do we spend so much time talking about it? In a nutshell, the inbound strategy is a holistic, data-driven approach to marketing that attracts companies and converts them into lasting customers.

Wow, that is a mouthful. Another way to describe it is smart content marketing plus software automation.

OK, so how does it work? There is a four prong process to execute this strategy.

The problem is that most industrial and manufacturing companies have spent years building up their offline collateral. They have tons of brochures, case studies and other hard-copy pieces that are just gathering dust. This is a great source of low handing fruit that we see for industrial marketing.

One of my favorite phrases in inbound marketing is recycle. You need to be able to take a piece of content that you have developed to hand out at a trade show, or for a salesperson to give to a prospect, and make it valuable online.

However, there are pitfalls here. Sure you can just take a pdf of the content and put it on your website. However, that is not the most efficient strategy. Let’s take a look at how you can maximize your strategy for online marketing.

It is About Bettter, Not More Sales Leads

Ever feel that way? I know that I have in the past. No matter how many leads I generated, it was never enough.

Then I figured out something interesting. It was not necessarily the number of leads that sales wanted; it is the quality of leads. If your sales team has a few great leads, they are going to be much more satisfied than if they have a huge number of mediocre ones.

This is how you can generate better leads for your industrial sales team.

Persona: The best way to get started is to ask sales exactly whom they want to talk with, who would make the best leads? Get the demographics, the title, the years of experience and build an ideal customer for sales. Work on this persona with your sales teams in the same room, so you both agree on exactly who would make an excellent prospect for them.

Every time that you create anything you need to have that ideal person in mind.

Problem: Now that you have your ideal persona you can move on to what problem they have. Why do prospects contact your company or your competitors?

This is not how your product is great, the features it has or how it is made from the highest strength. It is about how your product provides a solution to your customer’s need.

What problem do you solve for your customers?
How do you make their life and job easier?
Why is their boss going to promote them by choosing your solution?

Research: Now do a little keyword research to figure out what search terms your sales teams ideal prospect would look for to find their solution. Try to look at lower difficulty long-tail keywords that might not generate the most traffic, but are easier to break into quicker. You can use
Google’s Keyword Planner as a free resource.
Pick out a few keywords for research.

Blog for Leads: The next steps is to take some of your keywords that you found and start writing blog posts around them. Use the keyword in the title, the meta description, the header, the content and as the alt image. Talk about the problems that your ideal prospects face and illustrate how they can solve them. Try not to make your post super-salesly, make them informational.

This does two things. It gives your sales teams something to send or talk to prospects about, and it helps you with being found by prospects.

Offer Page: Finally be sure to have a valuable offer for your visitors. Ideally, something that ties to how you can help them solve their problems. If you have a whitepaper about how your solutions assist in resolving problems the prospects have, awesome! You need a Call to Action that leads to your landing page where you host your whitepaper. Be sure to build your landing page around a related keyword.